Philip Baker Hall

Philip Baker Hall takes the lead in Paul Thomas Anderson's Hard Eight. A 1997 review in the British Film Institute archive calls his brief appearance in the film it is actually concerned with oddly slapdash, and in the same sentence says he is masterly in Hard Eight. The archive's notice on Cradle Will Rock introduces him as the Countess's tired and wealthy husband. His name sits on seven pages there, but on five of them it appears in the credits and nowhere else: the reviews of Magnolia and The Insider, both films he is in, never reach him in the body of the text. That 1997 piece also treats casting of this kind as a device meant to lend a production a false flavour of American independent cinema, and judges it unnecessary. Film Independent listed him in the male lead category at its 1998 ceremony for that performance.